This invention has relation to portable rifle rests used for steadily and solidly supporting a rifle or other similar firearm in the process of zeroing in the bore of the rifle with respect to the gun sights thereof or for any other purpose.
Customarily, this support is provided by the manufacturer or other professional by elaborate clamps, vices, and other holding means, during the manufacture or overhaul of the gun. However, for use in the field, bean bags or sand bags have to be built up to accomplish this purpose. The present invention presents a portable rifle rest which will be most useful to a person wanting to zero in or sight in his rifle in the field.
Other portable rifle rests have been suggested such as those shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,772,813 granted on Nov. 20, 1973 to Sands, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,711,984 granted on Jan. 23, 1973 to Dyer et al.
The Sands patent provides but a single narrow cushioned V-shaped rod to support the rifle, thus making the so-called rifle shooting stand merely a guide or a positioning member and not truly a "rest" capable of supporting the gun without further outside supports.
The patent to Dyer discloses a very involved and complicated nesting contraption which can be taken apart and laboriously built up to provide a horizontal pad on which a gun can be rested in adjacent relationship to a telescope or other sighting device or the like. It suffers from the severe drawbacks of being extremely expensive to manufacture and extremely time consuming to put into place for operation, and from having no convenient adjacent location where bullets, shells, tools and scopes and the like can be stored.
To provide a portable gun rest which is selectively almost instantaneously "set up" and "knocked down", and to overcome the problems with gun stands and shooting benches of the prior art, the present portable rifle rest was invented.